The day is slipping by. At 6.48, after one of those nighttime visits my age demands, I decided to go back to sleep. The postman woke me when a heavy parcel fell to the floor with an emphatic thud, and 8.02 I rose. After checking emails (nothing of interest) I answered my WP comments and looked up butterflies on websites. The USA has 750 species, Australia has 420, the UK has 55. I feel, yet again, that I am the poor relation.  Then I wrote a poem. It is now 9.58 and mid-morning approaches, signaling an end to what I always feel is my most productive time.

The “poem” that I wrote is far from complete, but it is a promising start. In human terms, I have the skeleton in place, and mostly in the right order. Some of the limbs have flesh on.  More a zombie than a human, and more a grotesque pile of words than a finished poem, but it’s a start. Every journey starts with a single step, every pearl with a grain of sand, and every poem begins when you put a few words together to form a thought or picture. They aren’t always the right words or in the right order, and they don’t always appear in the finished piece, but it’s a start. It’s already on its second title . . .

I’ve been worrying about my poetry recently.

it’s 10.22. I have eaten cereal and fruit, drunk tea and watched birds. At one point we had 16, possibly more. It’s difficult to tell when they are milling about and perching inside shrubs. It is a great advance from the handful we used to get when we moved in last winter. How much of teh change is due to a gradual build-up, and how much is due to seasonal changes, we don’t know. I will have to look up kaleidoscope in the dictionary.

Invented by a Scotsman, patented 1817, it seems to have been regarded as a serious bit of scientific kit in its day, rather than the child’s toy it became. See, I wanted to look up a word to use in writing about a whirling mass of birds, and ended up reading about Scotland, science and the Disruption of 1843. That’s where my time goes.

Back with my poetry thoughts, I’ve been worrying that I have become one of those poets I used to view with suspicion – friendly with editors, prolific and widely published. But have I written anything of merit, or have I just found myself a groove where I churn out the equivalent of greeting card verses for poetry magazines?

That’s something I will be thinking about over the next few weeks. For now, as the clock nears 11am, I will add tags and photos to this post and think about what comes next.

Coffee, sorting books and worrying about the direction of my creative life.  It is enough.

Pictures are from July 2019